Alex Clark

The priest’s tale

Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind must be in the running for one of the year’s best novels

issue 24 March 2018

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far wider audience than she has hitherto gained — so much so that just before Gaby Wood’s appointment as literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, the critic wrote a lengthy exploration of Harvey’s prodigious qualities, describing her as ‘this generation’s Virginia Woolf’.

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